Inversión pública y privada en México: ¿motores complementarios del crecimiento económico?

This article analyzes the evolution of gross fixed capital formation in Mexico, and especially the interactions between private and public ones, and its relationship with the rate of economic growth in the 1960-2018 period. The work is organized in the following way. The introduction presents the purpose of the study in detail. Section I examines the theoretical discussion around public and private investment and their complimentary or competitive interrelationships. The following section presents the methodology used here for the empirical analysis, it explains key aspects in the construction of the data series that were carried out, always based on official sources. As explained there, the empirical analysis covered two complementary validation efforts: The first is based on cash flow accounting models to calculate “Keynesian” multipliers of investment over the gross domestic product (GDP), for selected sub-periods: 1) the state-led industrialization stage (1960-1981), and 2) the stage of market reforms already in full operation (1988-2018). The second effort resorted to modern time series econometrics—it goes without saying that are based on the same data from the first exercise—to balance the interrelationships between private and public investment in the growth trajectory of the Mexican economy. The conclusions are presented in the last section, which, in our opinion, provide relevant inputs to better understand the interaction of private and public investment in Mexico’s economic growth process, and with this, perhaps, to better design an agenda development to get the country out of the slow-growth trap in which it has been plunged for decades.